


Annie vs. Margo, or whatever

by AmStramGram



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: 'carnage' style, Father-Daughter Relationship, Future Fic, Gen, Kid Fic, Light Angst, Reunion, mention of bullying
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-07
Updated: 2016-01-07
Packaged: 2018-05-12 09:43:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5661742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmStramGram/pseuds/AmStramGram
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mickey's daughter got into a fight with another girl and the school's Principal insists that the parents and both kids meet to talk about it. Which is alright... until he realizes who the other girl's father is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Annie vs. Margo, or whatever

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Vintage_lover_who who beta'ed this!  
> Also, season 6 is ignored in this fic.

When the school calls Mickey to tell him that his daughter got into a physical fight with another little girl, he doesn’t believe them. He raises his voice, just a little bit, telling them that they’ve gone completely mad and that they’d better take care of the real issues, of the kids actually hitting other kids, instead of Annie who probably just threw a pen at someone else or some shit.

“And she can’t even aim right so what, the floor got hurt or something?”

But the school’s Principal insists that it’s a real fight, with hair-pulling and punches in the arm and apparently even a bite. _And yes, we have the right number, we call for Annabel Milkovich indeed, if you could come pick her up and have a talk with us…_

When Mickey hangs up, he still doesn’t believe it. Because Annie is the very last person he’d think would throw herself into a fight, so what the fuck. He got used to being called for Yevgeny, the kid was a nightmare, got suspended all the time, it’s a miracle the school never permanently expelled him. But Annie? She never got into any kind of trouble, except maybe for being too quiet in class or misplacing her pencil case every other day or whatever. 

He runs a hand through his hair, staring at the wall. Shit. That can’t be good and to be fair, he’s feeling quite anxious. What must’ve happened today that made her punch another kid? Well, he’d find out soon enough anyway. 

* 

He’s not used to seeing the school this quiet. It’s only two in the afternoon and all the kids are in the classrooms, there’s nobody on the playgrounds or in the halls. Usually when he comes here it’s to pick up Annie after class, so there are kids running everywhere, screaming, talking, plus all their parents, making it a real barn-yard. Or it’s on parent-teacher meetings, and it’s quieter but there are still people everywhere he looks. Now it’s just empty, his steps echoing in the hall, and it feels weird. It’s been a very long time since he’s had to pick up Yev from the Principal’s office, so he’s not exactly used to it anymore.

He finds his way easily though, remembers it well. It’s upstairs, first on the left, last door on the right. There’s a bench beside the door and a metal badge on the wall that reads _Principal Albert HUANG._ And on the bench there’s Annie looking up at him with a frown and arms crossed, like she was mad at him or something. 

He stops in front of her. He’s quite relieved that there’s no actual physical mark of a fight on her face. No blood, no cut, no bruise. Well, that’s a good sign, isn’t it? He remembers himself at nine years old, already having got his first black eye from another kid his age. Well, okay, he was more _violent_ to begin with. Annie, frankly… she couldn’t even hurt that mosquito that was fucking biting her last summer. And she cried when Mickey crushed it on her arm with his finger. She actually _cried over a mosquito_ , for fuck’s sake. So, yeah. No wonder there’s no broken nose here, there probably wasn’t even a real fight in the first place. This school’s getting too paranoid. 

“You okay?” he asks, because he can see that her face is clean, but doesn’t know about the skin under her clothes.

She nods once, looking away, and he sighs, relieved that at least she’s not hurt. 

“Okay kiddo, what happened there?” he wonders, crouching to be on eye-level with her, hands on her knees to maintain his balance. She keeps pouting at him silently, and he sighs again. “A fight, uh? I hope that at least it was worth me ditching work to come and get you,” he adds with a little smile. 

The corners of her mouth quirk up a bit. She can never pout for very long. He pats her knee, then stands up and nods towards the door. 

“Come on.”

He knocks, and almost immediately the door opens and Principal Huang greets him with a cheerful smile. 

“Mister Milkovich! I am so glad you could come, and sorry for the inconvenience.”

They shake hands, then he steps aside to let them both come in. When Annie walks past him, he smiles brightly at her (like he wasn’t going to suspend her for the rest of the day, the fucker) but her brown cheeks redden a bit and she stares at the floor, going to a chair and sitting on it. Mickey sits on the one next to her, and Huang takes place behind his desk. He looks fondly at Annie for a second, then smiles at Mickey again and says, in a voice tinted with fake sadness, “I guess you know why you’re here…”

Mickey blinks. “Well… yeah, you told me on the phone half an hour ago that she got into a fight.”

“Exactly. She got into a fight with another student, fourth grade. You are in third grade, right, Annabel?”

Annie raises her eyes for a second, then looks at her hands again. She’s apparently very upset to be here. “Yes,” she simply answers, so low that Mickey wonders if Huang heard. 

But the Principal nods, still with his shit-eating grin. “Good, good. So. From what I understood, what Mrs Hutcher told me—”

“Mrs Hutcher?” 

“She watches the students during the lunch break in the dining hall. That’s where the altercation happened.”

_Altercation._ Mickey somehow manages to hold back a snort. 

“She told me that the other student, Margo, took Annabel’s drawing book, which got Annabel angry, and she threw herself on Margo and hit her to get her book back. Margo didn’t let it go and responded to the aggression.”

_Aggression._ Jesus Christ. 

“Mrs Hutcher had to separate them, because they wouldn’t hear anything.” The Principal doesn’t smile anymore. He has a very serious look on his face and watches Mickey like he was expecting him to break into tears or something. When he obtains no reaction, he leans forward to get closer to Mickey and says pointedly: “Your daughter actually bit the other girl.”

Mickey looks down at Annie, eyebrows raised high. “Really? You bit her?” She doesn’t look up and doesn’t answer. Mickey sighs and looks back at the Principal. “Look, I’m sure she regrets it. And it never happened before, and will never happen again.”

Huang gets his bright smile back. “I’m certain it was only a one-time thing. Annabel never caused any trouble before, actually, this is the first time I have to call either one of you in my office.”

_That’s because you weren’t there when Yev was,_ Mickey thinks. 

“That’s why we decided on just a suspension for the rest of the day. Because we believe, and hope, that it was just a slip and will not happen again.”

He looks pointedly at Annie, who nods quietly.

“Wonderful. Mrs Hutcher and I also encourage you and Margo’s parents to meet and talk about it with your daughters, have them apologize and be friends again.”

At that, Annie frowns, but she still doesn’t say anything, her arms tight against her chest, one foot tapping the side of the chair she’s sitting on. Mickey knows what she thinks: friends, really? They probably never were in the first place. It’s not like Annie talks constantly about everyone and everything happening at school, but he knows enough to be certain that there’s no Margo amongst her friends. Plus, this kid’s apparently one year older, so they never had any classes together. 

“I already spoke to Margo’s father, and he agreed to meet you and Annabel soon enough to talk about it.”

_Wonderful._ Mickey nods, because what can he say? That he absolutely doesn’t want to meet the girl’s parents? That he doesn’t think it will do any good? They’ll probably be condescending pricks blaming Annie’s bad behavior on his solo parenting and knuckle tattoos. They’ll want her to apologize with a bow and watery eyes when fuck it, their daughter started it. She shouldn’t have stolen Annie’s drawing book in the first place. 

Mickey’s kind of glad his daughter defended herself, actually. He’s relieved to see that she won’t let older kids bully her or whatever that was. She bit, she actually fucking bit, which maybe is a scary move, like, scarier than just a punch; hopefully she won’t turn cannibalistic, but it’s kind of badass. She reacted, she strongly did, and didn’t even get anything worse than a half day of suspension as a consequence. _Nice,_ he thinks.

“I took the liberty of giving Margo’s father your number, I hope you don’t mind. He gave me his,” Huang smiles, sliding a piece of paper across his desk towards Mickey, “So that you can call each other and agree on a time and place to meet with the girls. The sooner, the better, obviously.”

Mickey picks up the paper and puts it in his jeans’ pocket. He’s not actually okay with the fact that this guy gave his phone number to a complete stranger, but he doesn’t say anything. He just wants to get out of there, drop Annie at Iggy’s or Svetlana’s or whoever will be free to watch her for the rest of the afternoon, and go back to work. 

“Anything else?” he asks.

The principal seems to think about it for a moment, looking at Annie pensively, then shakes his head. “No, no, I think that’s it.” 

They both stand up, Annie following a couple of seconds later. The principal shakes Mickey’s hand again. “I am deeply sorry for the inconvenience,” he repeats. “I already spoke to Annabel, who assured me that it wouldn’t happen again, and I am certain that it’s the truth. Like I said, she never caused any disturbance until now; let’s hope she’ll keep it that way.”

“Sure. Thank you.”

“See you on Monday then, Annabel.”

She nods again, mouth closed tight, cheeks red again, eyes going from her dad to the Principal to the ground, and then to her dad again. They exit the office and as soon as the door closes, Mickey exhales a breath he didn’t know he was holding. He really hates being in that office.

He looks down at his daughter, who reaches to take his hand. 

“You got everything?” Mickey asks. She has her schoolbag on her shoulders and her coat in her hands, but who knows, she probably forgot her food or gym bag or pencil case again somewhere in the school. 

“I think so,” she says in a flat voice.

“Your drawing book’s in your bag?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

They walk in silence until they reach the car and hop inside, then he starts talking again when they stop on the first red light, glancing at his daughter through the rear-view mirror. She’s looking at something on the sidewalk.

“You knew this girl? Margo?”

“No.”

“Why did she take your drawing book?”

Annie only shrugs and Mickey sighs. He’d like to know every detail about this fight, listen to Annie’s version through her mouth instead of Huang’s or what “Mrs Hutcher” told him. He prompts again: “She was mean to you?”

Annie shrugs once more but after a few seconds, once the light turns green and Mickey starts driving again, she says: “She wanted to see what I was drawing.”

“You were drawing during lunch?”

“Yes.”

He knows that she likes it, drawing in her little blue book, but he hopes that’s not all she’s doing during her lunch breaks. 

“Margo came and she asked me what I was doing, and I told her that I was drawing. She wanted to see, but I didn’t want to show her so she took it. She took my book. I told her to give it to me, but she just laughed and showed it to her friends and I asked again but she wasn’t listening to me.”

Mickey tightens his grip on the wheel. Shit, that looks like something _he_ would have done at ten. Less fun now that he hears his own daughter talk about it from the other side.

“So you punched her?”

“She wanted to throw it or tear it.”

“Really? Your drawing book?”

“Yes. She’s mean. And I didn’t want her to ruin it so I jumped on her to get it back and she pushed me and I fell on the ground.”

She doesn’t add anything else, so Mickey glances at her once more and she’s looking through the window again, like the story was over.

“And? Didn’t you bite her at some point?”

She shrugs once more, and he has a feeling that he won’t hear anything else now so he stops the questions and leaves her with her thoughts. He grabs his phone, finds Svetlana’s number on speed dial and soon her voice echoes in the car through the speakers. 

“Yes?”

“Hey Svetlana? You home?”

“No, I’m working. What? There’s a problem with Yevgeny?”

“No, no, it’s Annie. She got suspended from school and I need someone to watch her this afternoon while I go back to work.”

He hears his daughter protest but she quietens when he glares at her through the mirror. She resumes her pouting — apparently, she doesn’t appreciate him telling her brother’s mother that she got into trouble at school. 

Svetlana, being Svetlana, sniggers a little. “Finally, I was starting to wonder if it was actually you raising her.”

“Fuck you,” but he’s smiling, because yeah, he was starting to wonder too why his daughter was so unlike him. That’s stupid, but it reassures him a little, knowing she’s got a tiny bit of Milkovich in her, even if it shows up only once every nine years. Well, she doesn’t have a single Milkovich gene, strictly speaking, but Mickey’s been raising her for six years; it was about time it started to rub on her a little. 

They end the call, and he tries Iggy next. Miraculously, his brother answers on the second ring: “Hey bro!”

“Hey, listen, I’ve got Annie here who got suspended from school—”

“Really? Annie got suspended? _Your_ Annie?”

He can clearly see her rolling her eyes at her uncle’s incredulous voice— and really can’t blame her.

“Yes. Anyway, I was wondering if I could drop her at your place in like, fifteen minutes. I gotta go back to work.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Great, thanks man.”

Annie’s definitely looking happier during the rest of the ride. He knows she likes it better at Iggy’s because he lets her do basically whatever she wants, but Mickey prefers Svetlana when he has a choice… for this exact same reason. 

He pulls up in front of Iggy’s house and turns off the engine, but doesn’t get off the car yet. He twists around to have a better look at his daughter. “Hey… you would tell me if there was anything else, right? Like if she said something to you? Something bad?”

_Something about, for example, the color of your skin and the way your hair is all messy, the fact that you don’t have a mother, that your father is not your real father, that he’s going out with men instead of women, the fact that you’re small for your age and don’t talk much_. Remarks that he expects her to come home with but she actually never has. He’s very glad about it, he really hopes that’s because she’s in a good school or the West Town kids are well behaved or whatever, but he also wonders if she tells him everything. 

“She just made fun of my drawing,” Annie answers with a scowl. He can see that it really gets to her. 

“Okay. It wasn’t nice of her to make fun of your drawings.”

She finally smiles a little.

“If any kid at school bothers you about something, anything, you come and tell me, alright?”

“Yeah, alright.”

He smiles back at her. “Okay, kiddo, let’s go.”

They get off the car and reach Iggy’s front door, a sad piece of wood with chipped brown paint that has seen better days. But right as he raises his hand to knock, he hears a faint sniffle behind him and looks back at Annie, his arm falling as soon as he notices that she’s fucking crying. Her lip quivers, her eyes are all watery, and she has that crease on her forehead she only gets when it’s real cry and not just good old sham. 

“What’s now?” he sighs.

She shrugs, breathing deep to calm down but it’s all shaky and doesn’t seem to work at all. A tear escapes her left eye and rolls down her cheek, which Mickey wipes with the pad of his thumb. 

“What’s wrong, Annie?”

“I didn’t want…” she starts, voice high pitched, sounding almost desperate. “I didn’t want to get into a fight. I didn’t want to bite her.”

Mickey frowns. Fuck. Maybe it all touched her a lot more than he thought. Which makes sense after all, she never intentionally hit anyone in her life before that and he knows she’s just afraid of _hurting_. And here, she blew off, she hurt this other little girl, she went violent for the very first time, and thinking about it now probably makes her feel awful about herself. What’s more, she got sent to the Principal’s office and suspended from school for the rest of the day, which is also new and stressful for the carefully discreet student that she is. Rough day there. 

He kisses the top of her head, then sits down on the step before the door. “Come here,” he says, and she joins him, leaning against his side, sniffing loudly. He envelops her with his arm and wipes away another tear. “You shouldn’t have done what you did. But Margo shouldn’t have done what she did either. She shouldn’t have stolen your book, she shouldn’t have laughed at it with her friends, and she shouldn’t have threatened to tear it. You just… you reacted with your guts, and maybe it’s not always the best thing to do, but sometimes you can’t help it. You just have to assume the consequences and think of it as some kind of lesson, you know? You feeling bad about it, that means that you realize it was a mistake, and you’ll remember it next time you want to jump on someone. Next time, you’ll try another way, because now you know that the physical fight way is not _your_ way. Hey, you know what you should try instead? Try screaming. As high and loud as you can, with your super glass-breaking girl vocal chords. That’s a great way to have your opponent freeze and drop everything they’re doing to put their hands on their ears. Works like a charm.”

She sniffles again, chuckling slightly at the same time. 

“Can I try that with Iggy when he wants to watch baseball on TV?” she says in such a weak voice that he squeezes her a little tighter.

“Sure. That’ll make him drop the remote control and you can grab it and put on your cartoons instead.”

“No, I want to watch wrestling.”

“Oh I don’t think you’ll have to scream to get Iggy to watch wrestling with you, bug.”

She laughs a bit more wholeheartedly this time, and they both relax a little. 

“Yeah, that’s true. Maybe I could put on figure skating then.”

“That should do it.”

They stay quiet for several seconds, still pressed against each other’s sides, Mickey’s hand combing his daughter’s hair away from her forehead ( _why does she always end up taking off the hair band he takes ten fucking minutes to tie her crazy hair with every goddamn morning?_ ). She has her head on his shoulder and he can feel the hitches in her breathing slowly calming down. Finally she says, quieter, “Do you think Margo hates me now?”

“Well she had it coming, didn’t she?”

“But I hurt her.”

He sighs. “Do _you_ hate Margo?”

She seems to think about it for a long moment, then answers, “I don’t know. She was mean to me. But I was mean to her too. So I don’t know.”

He hesitates before offering, reluctantly, “Would you feel better about it all if you got to talk to her like Principal Huang said?”

“Like, apologizing?”

“Uh… yeah.”

She considers it a couple of seconds. “When?”

“I don’t know. Maybe this weekend. I’d have to agree on a time with her parents.”

“Will she apologize to me, too?”

“She probably will.”

“Then I’d like that.”

“Okay.”

They stay there for another minute or so, and when he tilts his head to look at her face and sees her smile back at him, eyes dry, he stands up, pulling her up with him. 

He finally knocks on the door and Iggy opens after a few seconds, in tank top and sweatpants, smiling widely. He half hugs Mickey, then bends down to high five Annie who, despite the circumstances, is delighted to spend the afternoon with her third favorite person in the world — the first two being Anastasia (yes, from the movie) and Yevgeny; Mickey’s probably somewhere in the top ten (hopefully before Rocky the goldfish), maybe five when he’s not forcing her to eat vegetables. 

Entering the house to drop her backpack in the living room, Mickey smells a very distinct odor and notices a half smoked joint waiting in the ashtray. 

“For fuck’s sake, Iggy, I told you to not fucking smoke this shit around the kid,” he groans, glaring hard at his brother.

“Hey, I ain’t smoking around her! You both just happen to arrive when I was in the middle of it, I’ll keep the rest for later.”

Mickey shakes his head in annoyance and goes to crush it himself. “I don’t care, the smell is fucking bad as it is,” he says dryly while opening a window. “She’s gonna get out of here with a pot-smelling coat and the teachers will look at me like I’m forcing her to smoke it or something.” 

“That’s not—”

“The fuck?!” says Mickey, taking in the half dozen empty beer cans laying on the coffee table near the ashtray. He didn’t notice them before. He walks towards his brother, watching him closely, eyes squinting. “Are you _drunk_?” 

“I’m not fucking drunk, dude, they’re not from today—”

Mickey gives him his darkest glare. “Do I have to find someone else to watch my daughter today?”

He hears a loud squeak, then a little hand is tugging at his sleeve.

“No, Daddy, please, I want to stay here! Please!”

But Mickey doesn’t look away from Iggy, trying to figure out if he’s high or drunk. He actually seems fine enough, or at least not worse than usual— but with him, you never know, especially in times like these. His long-time girlfriend left two months ago, and Mickey’s afraid it’s throwing him in the same ugly spirals he was in neck-deep before he found her.

Iggy frowns and responds in a somewhat hard tone, “I had friends over yesterday, I just forgot to throw away the cans. And I barely took three puffs of that joint. You need to chill out, man.”

Mickey lowers his voice so that Annie, who left again to explore her uncle’s fridge, doesn’t hear. “And _you_ need to cut this shit out. Don’t give me the ‘friends over’ bullshit, I know what you’re doing, and you have to stop. Don’t… fuck. You were doing great, Iggy. Don’t throw everything away.”

Iggy takes a step back and runs a hand over his face. He stares at Mickey sternly, fingers opening and closing by his side. He looks kind of miserable like this, trying not to answer with something he’d regret, but then Annie breaks the heavy silence by jumping in front of her uncle and asking excitedly, “Can we see the wrestling? Can we?”

He blinks a few times, then looks down at her and his face breaks into a bright smile. He’s a totally different person like that. “Why’d you think you’re here, Annie-Beanie?”

She laughs, her gloom from earlier way gone, then starts pushing Mickey towards the door. “You can go now! See you later, Daddy!”

“Yeah, yeah, okay, I’m going.”

She stops pushing him when they reach the still open door, letting him move forward on his own. He turns around but doesn’t have time to say anything before the door closes in his face with a loud _bang_. He stares at it, dumbfounded by this sudden rejection, then sighs heavily and gets back to his car. 

*

Later that evening, when Annie’s in bed and Mickey’s trying to convince himself to wash the dishes now and not tomorrow morning, he remembers the little paper in his pocket, the one with Margo’s father’s phone number on it. He takes it out, opens it and pins it on the fridge to remember to call. But right as his fingers leave the piece of paper, allowing him to read the writing on it, he freezes. His heart misses a beat, seems to fall on his stomach, his eyes go wide, his jaw slacks open. What. The. Actual. _Fuck_. 

_Ian Gallagher_. That’s the name that’s written on it, under the phone number, in this sloppy handwriting he never thought he’d recognize, not after over twenty years of not seeing it. Ian Gallagher is Margo’s father. Annie fought with the daughter of Ian fucking Gallagher. Holy shit. _Holy shit_. How is that… how… Holy shit! 

Mickey can’t even think straight. It seems so unrealistic, so random, so sudden, he just can’t process it. Maybe that’s not him, he thinks. Maybe that’s another Ian Gallagher, or maybe that’s Gollogher or Gallapher and it would make sense because the letters aren’t… ok, no. It’s written Gallagher alright, and it’s his handwriting, Ian’s handwriting, he knows what it looks like and even if it changed a bit, more adult maybe, less round, it’s still very recognizable. 

Alright. Alright. He has to calm down. Think it through. So, Ian has a daughter, that’s fine, that’s totally fine. His daughter had a fight with Mickey’s daughter. Fine. And now, Annie wants to apologize, which means he has to meet Margo’s parents, which means he has to meet Ian Gallagher. Fine too, right? No big deal. Or maybe he’ll meet her mother. Or Margo’s— or Margo’s other dad. If she has another dad. That would be better, frankly, he doesn’t care about the mom, and he’d rather meet the other dad than Ian himself. 

Heck, he’s over Ian. He’s been over him for a very, very long time now. Of course he still thinks about him some days; damn, he was the first person he loved, the first he kissed, his first boyfriend, he came out for him, blew up so many barriers, he went through hell for him and with him and they helped each other in more ways than he can count. Ian Gallagher practically saved his life from being miserable, was an actual father to his son for months, and on top of that, he shattered Mickey’s heart in millions of piece: it’s only logical that the guy’s name is written in permanent ink in his brain. So yeah, he still thinks about him sometimes, but that’s about it. He doesn’t love him anymore, he’s glad he was such an important part of his past (could have done without the last bit though) but he’s very fine with him staying, well, there. In the past, where he belongs. 

So even if he could emotionally handle it, probably, Mickey doesn’t want to meet him again. He doesn’t want to have to talk to him or see him, and certainly not when he’s got Annie to witness it, because he’s not sure of how he’d react. He’s not angry or sad or resentful anymore, not that he knows of, but yeah, it wouldn’t be the first time that he got a little too, uh… impulsive. 

Mickey suddenly wonders what Ian is thinking right now. Did Huang give him Mickey’s name along with his number? Probably, yeah. He’s maybe freaking out too. Or not. Maybe he’s like, _oh right, Mickey Milkovich, almost forgot about that guy!_ Mickey sighs. Of course he’s not thinking that. He knows he’s been as important to Ian as Ian has been to him, there’s a big chance he’s also wondering what to do with this number. Ignore it, or call it? Or wait for the other to call?

Mickey decides that it’s what he’s going to do. He’s not going to call, because he absolutely doesn’t want to, and if he can avoid any contact at all with the guy, he’ll probably be very fine about all this. Like, _hey, funny story, my ex-lover’s daughter goes to the same school as mine, ain’t it a hilarious coincidence? Here, have a little more tea._

Gosh. Let’s just hope he never calls, and Annie forgets about the apology party.

*

Of course, Annie doesn’t forget. She asks about it first thing in the morning, eating her cereals in her polka dot PJ’s, cross-legged on the kitchen counter. 

“Did you call Margo’s parents?”

Mickey avoids looking at her by concentrating very hard on last night’s dishes he’s currently washing. “I didn’t, bug.”

“Will you do it today?”

He sighs. “You sure you wanna do this? You know, you can also just tell her you’re sorry when you see her on Monday.”

“But I don’t want that, I wanted to do it this weekend!” she says, sounding very disappointed.

“Yeah, well, you can’t always do what you want, right?” he grumbles, mentally kicking himself for saying that in this situation. What a jerk. 

There’s a long silence during which he rubs the gratin dish with a little more strength than needed, considering it’s already spotless. From the corner of his eye, he can see Annie looking at him. She stopped eating and is now slummed against the wall tiles. 

“You said we could meet with her this weekend,” she says, on the verge of tears — okay, he was not expecting such an emotional reaction. She hops off the counter and exits the kitchen, leaving there her half eaten bowl of cereals.

Mickey feels guilt pulling at his guts. He knows that the prospect of meeting with Margo made her feel better yesterday, but he’s only realizing now how much she really wants to do this. How much she really _needs_ to do this. And here is he, chickening out because he doesn’t want to meet the father. He’s chickening out because of selfish reasons, however valid they seem to him. 

So on one side there’s Annie’s need to have this meeting (which he doesn’t really understand but he learned long ago that they don’t have the same notion of what’s important, so he tries to keep an open mind), and on the other side there’s this prospect of having to pull Ian out of the past, with all the possible consequences it might entail. 

Jesus. Why does it have to be so complicated all of a sudden? Why did a simple kid’s fight have to turn into this fucking dilemma?

*

He decides that he’ll keep thinking about it today, and if at seven tonight he still hasn’t made up his mind, he’ll ask Annie again. Then, if he can’t convince her that apologizing on Monday is super awesome, he’ll call Ian’s number. Maybe he won’t even answer, and the problem will be solved. _Not my fault, Annie, sorry dude._

Except he doesn’t have to think much longer because at half past twelve, his phone starts ringing. He knows that’s Ian, he unwillingly memorized the number by looking at it every time he walks past the fridge. He glances at his phone, buzzing on the wooden surface of the coffee table his feet are propped on. He doesn’t make a move to answer, just stares at it with his mind going blank and his heart beating like crazy. 

Annie looks up at him from where she’s sitting on the floor, chewing on a red pencil, both elbows on the table. When she sees that he’s not moving, she asks, eyebrows raised, “You’re not going to take it?”

That pulls him out of his trance, and he shakes his head. “No.”

She leans over the table to look at the phone screen, sill lighten up with the incoming call _(why the fuck does it take so long to reach voicemail?)_. “That’s an unknown number.”

“Yes.”

The phone finally stops buzzing. Mickey gets back to what he was doing and Annie does too, after another look at her father. Hopefully she doesn’t notice how fucking bad he feels right now. 

*

By the time Ian calls again, two hours later, Mickey’s decided to act like a fucking adult. He’ll swallow the bitter taste in his mouth, be a good parent and put aside his need to tell Ian to fuck off. So he takes a deep breath, checks that Annie’s bedroom door is closed, and answers the phone.

“Yeah?” His voice is a little rough and he wipes a hand on his mouth. He’s probably on the brink of a heart attack right now. 

There’s a silence on the other end of the line, then Ian says, “Hey, Mick.”

Shit, is that what his voice sounds like? Is that what it sounded like back then? He doesn’t remember it this way, or maybe that’s the phone, some people really don’t sound the same on the phone. He recognizes the ‘Mick’, though. That’s Ian indeed. “Hey, Gallagher.”

He can almost hear him smile. “Long time, uh?”

“Mhm.”

There’s another silence, and Mickey can’t help but smile a little himself. Okay, he survived the first words, even calmed down a little, maybe he can do this. He can fucking do this. _Think about the kids. Think about Annie._

“So uh,” Ian goes on. “Margo’s moms, they absolutely want us to talk about what happened yesterday. With the girls. You know… like Principal Huang, uh, strongly suggested.”

Mickey can’t help a silent laugh. _Yeah, right to the point, Gallagher. Nice._

“Would it…” he starts, then stops, and Mickey can hear him take a deep breath before he talks again. “Maybe we can meet, like, tomorrow? With Annabel and, uh, you if that’s alright with you, or maybe if she has other parents they can—”

“Yeah, yeah, tomorrow sounds good,” Mickey cuts him with a wince. And because he’s not thinking like his normal self, he adds, “We can do that in my place.” 

He immediately rolls his eyes at his own stupidity, like why the fuck would he want Ian’s entire family in his apartment, but before he has a chance to back up Ian says, “Okay. We can be there at three, if that’s fine with you.”

“Yep.” Mickey just wants to bang his own head against the wall. “I’ll uh, I’ll text you the address.”

“Great. Thank you so much.”

“Yeah.”

There’s another awkward silence, then Ian mutters, “So, see you tomorrow then, I guess?” 

“Yeah.”

And they hang up. As simple as that. Mickey slumps down on the couch and looks at his phone like it just told him a very bad riddle. 

“Yo, Annie?” he shouts. “Margo comes here tomorrow at three.” 

He gets no answer, but he’s sure she heard him with those paper-thin walls. Moaning at his own misfortune, he lies down on the couch, not minding his phone dropping on the carpet, and wishes he could sleep for forty-eight hours straight and let Annie manage the Gallaghers all by herself. God that would be awesome.

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](http://www.am-stram-gram.tumblr.com)


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